According to recent trends, information technology (IT) systems of companies are becoming ever more large and complex. For example, in some businesses, the IT system is no longer just an infrastructure of the business, but needs to act in partnership with the business to increase the value and competitiveness of the business. Furthermore, the rapid growth of IT systems is not limited to very large companies, but even mid-sized companies can now have hundreds of servers. The rapid growth of server virtualization technology is causing an acceleration of this trend.
Despite the recent trends of massive growth in data centers and other IT systems, the administrators of IT organizations are still required to efficiently manage these large and complex IT systems to keep them running properly. When a problem occurs, the administrators need to recognize that there is a problem, analyze the problem and then resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Typically, monitoring the health of an IT system and analyzing any problems that may arise is carried out using some form of availability and performance management software. This software usually includes the ability to discover devices in the IT system and identify their connections. This software can be operated remotely from the IT system that is the object or target of the management (i.e., the IT system to be managed may be referred to as the “management target system”), and can often display the devices discovered in the system on a display screen in a graphic or other manner of topological view, thereby providing an indication or report on the status of the respective devices, and possibly also automatically analyzing the cause of any problems.
Through use of such management software, administrators are relieved from a number of tedious operation tasks that they used to have to perform manually. However, as mentioned above, IT systems themselves are growing rapidly, while IT budgets are typically becoming more restricted. This has resulted in each administrator being responsible for managing a very large area of the IT system. Thus, there is a gap emerging between manageability provided by the current management software and the size of the systems that are required to be managed. In particular, the topological views provided by currently-available software for system monitoring or problem analyzing have become too complicated and are able to display only a small portion of the IT systems on a display screen at any one time. Since the topology of the entire system is information necessary for an administrator to properly carry out system management for managing availability and performance of the information system, there is no currently available solution for use with large and expandable IT systems.
Related art includes U.S. Pat. No. 7,249,347, to Chang et al.; US Pat. App. Pub. 2007/0094597 to Rostom; US Pat. App. Pub. 2007/0204231 to Cunningham et al.; and US Pat. App. Pub. 2007/0156861 to Nedelcu et al., the entire disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference.